Descartes said the brain interacted with the mind, but he never said anything like "the mind is software that runs on the hardware of the brain." As far as I know, no one had that idea until modern computers were invented.
Functionalism is central to contemporary philosophy of mind among analytic philosophers.
But surely analytic philosophy has been in retreat since Popper?
Oh no. They are still around. Most people just stopped paying attention to them. At this point I can't say I blame them. This may have started around the time of Popper but I don't think he takes any particular credit for this.
Having done philosophy for a while, I just got tired of countless intuition pumps that do little more than restate predetermined conclusions. I think it's better to cut away the needless scaffolding of intricate arguments and just state the conclusions we're trying to arrive at. This, at least, is academically honest.
I would also prefer that "simpler" positions are the default. The mind is just the brain. If it is not, we'd need a good reason to think this. I know it's hardly an argument, but I've yet to hear anything to convince me otherwise. The more fantastic the arguments I hear, the more weary I get. Mental zombies and Chinese rooms are just some of the most egregious. The entire enterprise of philosophy of mind has yet to shed it's Cartesian dualistic origins. When it gets past that I might start paying attention again.
I realize very well what you're saying. That line of reasoning has been around, and readily acknowledged by philosophers, for over 50 years. The whole idea behind functionalism is categorizing the brain as "hardware" and mind as "software". I'm saying too much has been made of this distinction, however. Does this mean that computers will never "think" like humans do? No, not really. But the brain as forged by millions of years of evolution is very different than computational algorithms engineered in 100 or so years by humans. We should learn much more neuroscience before we starting where, if anywhere, can we find the dividing line between the brain's "hardware" and "software".
I meant that religious people have a problem identifying mind and brain, and I meant to say that those two are pretty much identical.
The Churchlands espouse eliminativism, which is basically arguing for this identification. Most other philosophers in the subject argue against it. Most scientists studying the brain try to stay away from philosophy.
Wikipedia has done a fine job of listing authors seminal in functionalism. Functionalism is central to contemporary philosophy of mind among analytic philosophers. Doing a complete survey of academic philosophers to somehow prove this would be difficult. But I'd be interested in hearing what topics are more central to modern analytic philosophy of mind. I'm not so clear on continental philosophers, but both the article and the one it's replying to are of the analytic tradition.
Most anthologies on philosophy of mind, such as this one, are certainly concerned about the relationship between mind and brain. Looking at the table of contents of the previous anthology provides a glimpse at people who make their careers discussing such things. Of course, these are largely seminal authors, the people working in the field is much larger.
Cutting through the needless walls of text by both Sanchez and Brady, let me summarize the current state of the philosophy of mind:
1) We are little closer to reading off "beliefs" from human brains than we were 30 years ago. 2) Media often overgeneralizes the results of neuroscientists. 3) The brain is still nothing more than a mass of cells. 4) Religious people have a problem with (3). 5) Philosophers base their careers trying to argue for or against (3). 6) More specifically, philosophers think too highly of functionalism.
I say this as a philosopher and not a scientist, but having studied these topics for a while, I have more respect for the scientists than the philosophers.
There's nothing irrational about my position. I simply bite the bullet and say, "So much the worse for game companies."
Assuming copyright was removed, there would be consequences. Music would not go anywhere, though it may not be as polished or marketed. For every band that makes a living off their work there are tens or hundreds who cannot. Books the same way. There are plenty of authors out there, arguably none very good, but there would probably be a way to get the good stuff through the crap. Big budget movies and games would simply go away. I wouldn't mourn their loss.
I also think patents should be greatly scaled back. About the only positive use I can see is medical patents.
So you're saying the Underground Railroad should have attempted to be as conspicuous as possible? That homosexuals should have come right out decades ago and faced an extremely conservative society, consequences be damned? Many important social changes would never have occurred had they needed to start as overtly as you are suggesting.
I don't infringe copyright, I just don't believe that copyright should exist. It's silly to suppose that one must fully believe and internalize all laws of the current society. Social change in such case would be impossible.
Even if I was inclined to risk the consequences of copyright infringement, it would still be fairly silly to abandon society due to such a minor thing. Your "accept every single law or GTFO" attitude is fairly unrealistic.
You're right that if copyright infringement is wrong, something like bugs at launch don't suddenly override this. However, if one doesn't believe copyright should even exist, then nitpicks like this have more force.
And yes, it's perfectly possible to make a decent living as a programmer without the existence of copyright. I don't feel personally aggrieved by copyright infringement. I try to stay out of businesses where a company depends on copyright for its existence.
Yes, this flu is different. It is primarily killing young healthy adults. It looks to work the same way as the 1918 flu, killing those with the healthiest immune systems through the "cytokine storm".
That's why you should stick to Core 2 Duos, which run at 65W, and are performance competitive with the latest AMD chips in 99% of use cases (quad core only has real value to "power" users that do things like transcoding, ray tracing, run multiple VMs, or run server apps).
The i7 performance advantages just don't seem to be worth the doubling (or more) of TDP. The Phenom IIs don't fare much better.
Clean house, or threaten workers as the article suggested. Or maybe they'll just shut down and set up shop again when the heat is off. Without systemic reform this type of thing will be impossible to prevent or correct.
You can keep shaming US companies that do business with such Chinese firms, but most firms will not allow any inspection by media, especially Western media. And when something like this does get exposed, IBM and others will do as they just did "We're looking into it." They'll either find nothing wrong or switch to another firm that does the exact same thing. Heck it can be the same firm but "different" because they changed their name. Or maybe there will be "corrective action" which translates into "no change, business as usual". This problem has no easy solutions.
It wouldn't matter. I could type without looking and I was still only using two fingers from each hand. I guess I should have clarified what I meant by "hunt and peck".
The dvorak layout cannot be superior because that would imply that market acceptance does not necessarily equal superlative merit. It's a libertarian economic theory that I think clearly fails empirical tests.
For anecdote, I'll add that I have used dvorak exclusively for about 10 years. The biggest advantage to moving to dvorak, for me, was that I became a touch typist whereas before I was a hunt and pecking typist. Starting from scratch on a new layout made touch typing possible where it would be nearly impossible to avoid the temptation to hunt and peck when trying to get better at qwerty.
That certainly doesn't make a case that either is the superior layout. I think eventually what's superior will depend on the person and the language. The English language is a moving target, but moreover different subsets of tasks have different needs. It took me a long time to get used to UNIX key shortcuts on a dvorak layout.
The rail industry regularly repairs/replaces cars and rails. They are in a better position to lay down new infrastructure. They already have the plans all laid out for new infrastructure, and it would be a viable investment for them if they had a little financial help from the government--the amount of financial help needed being much less than has been allocated to various industry loans.
And this is just for freight rails. We can start looking at passenger rails again when Amtrak starts making a profit.
Last I checked, DDR3, which i7 requires, still had quite the premium over DDR2. Also, the motherboards, last I checked, started from about $300, while Core 2 motherboards can be obtained of course much cheaper.
And the benchmarks are a bit silly. How many people spend most of their time encoding video and running photoshop plugins? Gaming, OK, but other than that more realistic benchmarks for the average user would be more appreciated. Not just benchmarks that are designed to showcase multi-core processors.
To do it well, Windows would have to know what I was going to use before I started using it. I'd rather just use the extra physical memory than have my operating system try to figure when I'm going to come in in the morning or when I'll decide to hit the IDE or email client again.
I've known this argument for many years, I just don't think it applies anymore. The extra disk cache doesn't really help much, and what ends up happening is that I come in to work in the morning, unlock my work XP PC, and I sit there for 30 seconds while everything gets slowly pulled of the disk. XP thought it would be wise to page all that stuff out to disk, after all, I wasn't using it. But why would I care about the performance of the PC when I'm not actually using it?
At the very least, the amount of swap should be easily configurable like it is in Linux. I haven't actually used a swap partition in Linux for years, preferring instead to have 6 or 8gb of RAM, which is now cheap.
They're using their HDTVs as "monitors" for playing games. HDTVs typically have a native res of 1920x1080. My main computer "monitor" is 37" and 1920x1080.
Do we really want courts examining every disciplinary action that schools take?
Yes, as long as the schools are run by the government. Especially when skipping school is a crime. When involvement with government institutions is compulsory, they should be held to that much of a higher standard.
Do you really believe that students should be able to say this kind of thing about teachers or administrators?
No, they shouldn't. It should be a civil case. Similar if the student TP'ed the principal's house. It's a criminal matter, not a school administrative matter.
What I'm saying is that determinism and free will have nothing to do with one another. The only thing determinism is opposed to is randomness. And whether the will is ultimately deterministic or indeterministic has nothing to do with anything.
Freedom is not opposed to determinism, freedom is opposed to boundedness. Unlike random/determined, the free/bound relations only make sense when comparing two or more things. So you have to say "free with respect to what?", or "bound with respect to what?"
In clarifying the issue, we see that there are several things we can be free or bounded in relation to: ourselves, our environment, and possibly our "souls". Neither one's environment nor self is able to wholly bound the actions of the will. And so neither the "bounded" nor "free" propositional functions can be satisfied whichever of "environment" or "self" you take as the second argument.
But none of this is really worth worrying about--it really has nothing to do with anything. This along with any metaphysical argument invites the question "So what?" That is "Why should I care whether the will is free or bounded?" I can't see any reason to care.
You worry about the "initial" state determining future states. But think of it from the other direction. We can't change the past right? Why is then the past not "determined" by the future? In the end, if you're worried about being "determined", then it seems your assumptions lead to determinism from the future to the past. The laws of physics don't care. They are just mathematical equations. They work just as well whether t is positive or negative.
Finally, let's clarify the "free will" hypothesis in this new vocabulary. If humans are not deterministic, then neither are the fundamental particles. That is, random humans implies random particles. Or, from the contrapositive that the author gave, random particles implies random humans. OK, I've never heard of anyone arguing against this. Nor have I ever heard anyone having a reason to even question this. But then, talking about "free will" grabs more headlines than talking about "randomness".
Slashdot Mirror
Descartes said the brain interacted with the mind, but he never said anything like "the mind is software that runs on the hardware of the brain." As far as I know, no one had that idea until modern computers were invented.
Functionalism is central to contemporary philosophy of mind among analytic philosophers.
But surely analytic philosophy has been in retreat since Popper?
Oh no. They are still around. Most people just stopped paying attention to them. At this point I can't say I blame them. This may have started around the time of Popper but I don't think he takes any particular credit for this.
Having done philosophy for a while, I just got tired of countless intuition pumps that do little more than restate predetermined conclusions. I think it's better to cut away the needless scaffolding of intricate arguments and just state the conclusions we're trying to arrive at. This, at least, is academically honest.
I would also prefer that "simpler" positions are the default. The mind is just the brain. If it is not, we'd need a good reason to think this. I know it's hardly an argument, but I've yet to hear anything to convince me otherwise. The more fantastic the arguments I hear, the more weary I get. Mental zombies and Chinese rooms are just some of the most egregious. The entire enterprise of philosophy of mind has yet to shed it's Cartesian dualistic origins. When it gets past that I might start paying attention again.
I realize very well what you're saying. That line of reasoning has been around, and readily acknowledged by philosophers, for over 50 years. The whole idea behind functionalism is categorizing the brain as "hardware" and mind as "software". I'm saying too much has been made of this distinction, however. Does this mean that computers will never "think" like humans do? No, not really. But the brain as forged by millions of years of evolution is very different than computational algorithms engineered in 100 or so years by humans. We should learn much more neuroscience before we starting where, if anywhere, can we find the dividing line between the brain's "hardware" and "software".
I meant that religious people have a problem identifying mind and brain, and I meant to say that those two are pretty much identical.
The Churchlands espouse eliminativism, which is basically arguing for this identification. Most other philosophers in the subject argue against it. Most scientists studying the brain try to stay away from philosophy.
Wikipedia has done a fine job of listing authors seminal in functionalism. Functionalism is central to contemporary philosophy of mind among analytic philosophers. Doing a complete survey of academic philosophers to somehow prove this would be difficult. But I'd be interested in hearing what topics are more central to modern analytic philosophy of mind. I'm not so clear on continental philosophers, but both the article and the one it's replying to are of the analytic tradition.
Most anthologies on philosophy of mind, such as this one, are certainly concerned about the relationship between mind and brain. Looking at the table of contents of the previous anthology provides a glimpse at people who make their careers discussing such things. Of course, these are largely seminal authors, the people working in the field is much larger.
Cutting through the needless walls of text by both Sanchez and Brady, let me summarize the current state of the philosophy of mind:
1) We are little closer to reading off "beliefs" from human brains than we were 30 years ago.
2) Media often overgeneralizes the results of neuroscientists.
3) The brain is still nothing more than a mass of cells.
4) Religious people have a problem with (3).
5) Philosophers base their careers trying to argue for or against (3).
6) More specifically, philosophers think too highly of functionalism.
I say this as a philosopher and not a scientist, but having studied these topics for a while, I have more respect for the scientists than the philosophers.
There's nothing irrational about my position. I simply bite the bullet and say, "So much the worse for game companies."
Assuming copyright was removed, there would be consequences. Music would not go anywhere, though it may not be as polished or marketed. For every band that makes a living off their work there are tens or hundreds who cannot. Books the same way. There are plenty of authors out there, arguably none very good, but there would probably be a way to get the good stuff through the crap. Big budget movies and games would simply go away. I wouldn't mourn their loss.
I also think patents should be greatly scaled back. About the only positive use I can see is medical patents.
So you're saying the Underground Railroad should have attempted to be as conspicuous as possible? That homosexuals should have come right out decades ago and faced an extremely conservative society, consequences be damned? Many important social changes would never have occurred had they needed to start as overtly as you are suggesting.
I don't infringe copyright, I just don't believe that copyright should exist. It's silly to suppose that one must fully believe and internalize all laws of the current society. Social change in such case would be impossible.
Even if I was inclined to risk the consequences of copyright infringement, it would still be fairly silly to abandon society due to such a minor thing. Your "accept every single law or GTFO" attitude is fairly unrealistic.
You're right that if copyright infringement is wrong, something like bugs at launch don't suddenly override this. However, if one doesn't believe copyright should even exist, then nitpicks like this have more force.
And yes, it's perfectly possible to make a decent living as a programmer without the existence of copyright. I don't feel personally aggrieved by copyright infringement. I try to stay out of businesses where a company depends on copyright for its existence.
Yes, this flu is different. It is primarily killing young healthy adults. It looks to work the same way as the 1918 flu, killing those with the healthiest immune systems through the "cytokine storm".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:W_curve.png
Core 2 Duo 3.33Ghz. Supposedly these overclock better than most processors so you can get the single core performance even higher.
That's why you should stick to Core 2 Duos, which run at 65W, and are performance competitive with the latest AMD chips in 99% of use cases (quad core only has real value to "power" users that do things like transcoding, ray tracing, run multiple VMs, or run server apps).
The i7 performance advantages just don't seem to be worth the doubling (or more) of TDP. The Phenom IIs don't fare much better.
Clean house, or threaten workers as the article suggested. Or maybe they'll just shut down and set up shop again when the heat is off. Without systemic reform this type of thing will be impossible to prevent or correct.
You can keep shaming US companies that do business with such Chinese firms, but most firms will not allow any inspection by media, especially Western media. And when something like this does get exposed, IBM and others will do as they just did "We're looking into it." They'll either find nothing wrong or switch to another firm that does the exact same thing. Heck it can be the same firm but "different" because they changed their name. Or maybe there will be "corrective action" which translates into "no change, business as usual". This problem has no easy solutions.
Well obviously the workers at this factory don't think so, unless they were impressed into work against their will.
It wouldn't matter. I could type without looking and I was still only using two fingers from each hand. I guess I should have clarified what I meant by "hunt and peck".
The dvorak layout cannot be superior because that would imply that market acceptance does not necessarily equal superlative merit. It's a libertarian economic theory that I think clearly fails empirical tests.
For anecdote, I'll add that I have used dvorak exclusively for about 10 years. The biggest advantage to moving to dvorak, for me, was that I became a touch typist whereas before I was a hunt and pecking typist. Starting from scratch on a new layout made touch typing possible where it would be nearly impossible to avoid the temptation to hunt and peck when trying to get better at qwerty.
That certainly doesn't make a case that either is the superior layout. I think eventually what's superior will depend on the person and the language. The English language is a moving target, but moreover different subsets of tasks have different needs. It took me a long time to get used to UNIX key shortcuts on a dvorak layout.
The rail industry regularly repairs/replaces cars and rails. They are in a better position to lay down new infrastructure. They already have the plans all laid out for new infrastructure, and it would be a viable investment for them if they had a little financial help from the government--the amount of financial help needed being much less than has been allocated to various industry loans.
And this is just for freight rails. We can start looking at passenger rails again when Amtrak starts making a profit.
Last I checked, DDR3, which i7 requires, still had quite the premium over DDR2. Also, the motherboards, last I checked, started from about $300, while Core 2 motherboards can be obtained of course much cheaper.
And the benchmarks are a bit silly. How many people spend most of their time encoding video and running photoshop plugins? Gaming, OK, but other than that more realistic benchmarks for the average user would be more appreciated. Not just benchmarks that are designed to showcase multi-core processors.
To do it well, Windows would have to know what I was going to use before I started using it. I'd rather just use the extra physical memory than have my operating system try to figure when I'm going to come in in the morning or when I'll decide to hit the IDE or email client again.
I've known this argument for many years, I just don't think it applies anymore. The extra disk cache doesn't really help much, and what ends up happening is that I come in to work in the morning, unlock my work XP PC, and I sit there for 30 seconds while everything gets slowly pulled of the disk. XP thought it would be wise to page all that stuff out to disk, after all, I wasn't using it. But why would I care about the performance of the PC when I'm not actually using it?
At the very least, the amount of swap should be easily configurable like it is in Linux. I haven't actually used a swap partition in Linux for years, preferring instead to have 6 or 8gb of RAM, which is now cheap.
They're using their HDTVs as "monitors" for playing games. HDTVs typically have a native res of 1920x1080. My main computer "monitor" is 37" and 1920x1080.
I read through the entire article and didn't see anything that was funny. Is there some context I'm missing?
Do we really want courts examining every disciplinary action that schools take?
Yes, as long as the schools are run by the government. Especially when skipping school is a crime. When involvement with government institutions is compulsory, they should be held to that much of a higher standard.
Do you really believe that students should be able to say this kind of thing about teachers or administrators?
No, they shouldn't. It should be a civil case. Similar if the student TP'ed the principal's house. It's a criminal matter, not a school administrative matter.
What I'm saying is that determinism and free will have nothing to do with one another. The only thing determinism is opposed to is randomness. And whether the will is ultimately deterministic or indeterministic has nothing to do with anything.
Freedom is not opposed to determinism, freedom is opposed to boundedness. Unlike random/determined, the free/bound relations only make sense when comparing two or more things. So you have to say "free with respect to what?", or "bound with respect to what?"
In clarifying the issue, we see that there are several things we can be free or bounded in relation to: ourselves, our environment, and possibly our "souls". Neither one's environment nor self is able to wholly bound the actions of the will. And so neither the "bounded" nor "free" propositional functions can be satisfied whichever of "environment" or "self" you take as the second argument.
But none of this is really worth worrying about--it really has nothing to do with anything. This along with any metaphysical argument invites the question "So what?" That is "Why should I care whether the will is free or bounded?" I can't see any reason to care.
You worry about the "initial" state determining future states. But think of it from the other direction. We can't change the past right? Why is then the past not "determined" by the future? In the end, if you're worried about being "determined", then it seems your assumptions lead to determinism from the future to the past. The laws of physics don't care. They are just mathematical equations. They work just as well whether t is positive or negative.
Finally, let's clarify the "free will" hypothesis in this new vocabulary. If humans are not deterministic, then neither are the fundamental particles. That is, random humans implies random particles. Or, from the contrapositive that the author gave, random particles implies random humans. OK, I've never heard of anyone arguing against this. Nor have I ever heard anyone having a reason to even question this. But then, talking about "free will" grabs more headlines than talking about "randomness".